QAnon attracted considerable attention from politicians and the press during 2020. Headlines claimed that the group had exploded across social media platforms and was becoming mainstream; these claims were supported by instances of violence and studies of online activity. However, public opinion polls tell a different story. We examine polling data from 2018–2021 to understand the size and scope of QAnon support. Only 5–8 percent of the American public supports QAnon, making it one of the least supported conspiracy theories typically polled on. Moreover, support for the QAnon movement has remained stable over time, with no indication of becoming “mainstream.” We also find that QAnon support is less the product of left-right orientations, as often argued, than anti-establishment sentiments and anti-social personality traits. We argue that politicians strategically trafficked in QAnon rhetoric to expand their support, simultaneously activating a once irrelevant dimension of public opinion.

The Introduction lays out the book. It introduces the concept of democratic discontent, explaining how it differs from milder forms of political displeasure and how it can manifest in different forms like populism, ethnonationalism, conspiracism, and antipathy to democratic regimes. It then briefly describes the conflict between economic and cultural approaches to discontent, showing that both make valid findings, yet neither hypothesis is totally consistent with existing research. To overcome this impasse, the chapter introduces the affective political economy theory of economics, emotions, and culture, where emotions induced by economic troubles prime large groups of citizens to embrace culturally discontented narratives; cultural discontent then produces various forms of discontent, based on local conditions. Finally, it lays out the book’s empirical approach, discussing the use of mixed methods to test the theory, including experiments, observational surveys, and qualitative analysis and comparison of cases; this section also justifies the case selections. This section advises different kinds of readers about which sections they might find most interesting and which might be less relevant, especially regarding statistically dense sections of the book.

This chapter serves two primary purposes. First, it establishes the book’s conceptual schema of political discontent. It identifies three ways in which discontent can manifest: against regime institutions (low regime support/regime antipathy), against the political elite (anti-elitism and populism), or even against reality (conspiracism). This section addresses conceptual debates in the study of each type of discontent, selecting or developing definitions according to set criteria. It also discusses the two primary ways discontent can influence behavior: through support for political outsiders and through contentious politics. Second, the chapter summarizes existing approaches to the study of discontent. It discusses shared elements of the global political order, especially neoliberal capitalism, liberal democracy, and more recently multiculturalism. Political discontent varies in form from case to case but is generally shaped by a rejection of one or more elements of this order. Reviewing the scholarship on each subtype of discontent, the chapter finds a recurring debate between economic and cultural origins. Neither approach can fully explain discontent, but neither can be ignored or disproven. As a result, the chapter concludes that a comprehensive theory must synthesize these two approaches.

Opening with a disturbing example of how outmoded university structures can jeopardize a vulnerable student’s future, Chapter 1 introduces the structural lag between an increasingly diverse student generation that grew up with the smartphone and its easy access to information and the fragmented practices of the university. This gap is deepened by societal crucibles in contemporary American life, including the pandemic, economic change, extremism, climate change, and structural racism. By forcing universities online, the pandemic highlighted how important campus life is to students, the learning process, and how much of the university experience takes place outside the classroom. As universities prepare for post-pandemic education, they must take long-discussed and long-delayed steps to critically examine their history, address the bifurcation between faculty and service staff, reform their semi-independent institutional structures, and coordinate the array of student services toward the goal of a student-centered and holistic university experience.

In seeking overarching psychological explanations for barbarity and totalitarianism, there is a constant tug of reductionist logic that seeks to set aside the social, cultural and historical engines of radicalism and extremism and which leads to the inevitable conclusion that humans have an in-built and inevitable capacity to oppress and to destroy. However, in many respects, it can be argued that liberal democracies stand and fall on the underpinnings of the cliché that ‘one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter’. If only we understood our enemies better, and all that they have been through, then their world, and ours, would be a much better place. Meanwhile, a historical vista and understanding show that radicalised conceptions of democracy are a constant presence on both the far Left and Right of politics, often characterised by themes of coercive culture. This chapter will provide an analysis of the operation of such radicalised movements and will show how psychology has contributed to understanding them.

Hate speech is a form of communication that targets disadvantaged social groups in a harmful way. It can be seen as a driving force behind the successes of numerous populist politicians and extremist movements. In this chapter, we argue that studying hate speech can be crucial for a better understanding of political mobilisation, intergroup relations, and social media. We describe the role of hate speech in mobilising electoral support and violence, in the promotion of racism and prejudice, as well as in shaping attitudes towards government policies. We uncover how political ideology and hate speech are interconnected, and that the left-right political beliefs do not always explain why individuals turn to use hate speech. We also outline the dilemma between the protection against hate speech and the freedom of expression principles, that are at the core of current debates on derogatory language.

This chapter addresses the abuse of charitable religion. It begins with a brief history of the abuse of religious charities. This draws out the entrenched legal requirements for charities to guard against administrative and purposive abuse, and highlights the resourcing and remit issues that the Charity Commission has faced since its inception. It notes the general success of Muslim or Muslim-led charities to contextualise five pressing contemporary concerns: Charity Commission effectiveness, unregulated domestic fundraising, terrorist financing, foreign funding and extremist exploitation. Taking these in order of difficulty, it acknowledges the ‘faith factor’ where relevant and notes the need for theory when addressing unresolved policy questions about potentially dangerous foreign and non-state influence over important domestic institutions. The penultimate section models the two conventional theoretical interpretations of these issues and their attendant problems. The final section offers a pluralist response and details the most sensible reforms.

This chapter provides a detailed discussion of the main terms used in the books (e.g., radicalization, extremism, milieus, groups, and ideology). The core of the chapter is a review of the state of the art regarding the development and change of political attitudes in general and within extremist environments. The methodology of the book (criminological storyline approach) is explained and the most pressing gaps in the research literature regarding (extremist) side-switching are outlined. In short, the topic is highly under-researched and promises to offer fascinating insights into the relationship between extremists and their groups.

This chapter analyses a set of keywords which were used to refer to ‘Us’, that is the author of the text and the social group that they belong to, which includes the reader as a potential member of that group. The keywords examined in this chapter are Islam, Allah, Muslim, brothers, believers, Ummah and you. The chapter introduces the reader to the main method of analysis which involves identification of representation surrounding each keyword via grammatical patterns through the corpus analysis tool Sketch Engine.

This chapter functions as a literature review, beginning with a summary of some of the terminological issues surrounding the study of terrorism. This is followed by an overview of theorisations of terrorism as communication, that is, the theory that violent acts are communicative. We then discuss not the practices and (verbal) expressions related to clandestine violence undertaken by terrorist individuals or groups. We explore some of the findings from previous research relating to the patterns in terrorists’ words and communicative strategies. We then turn to violent jihadist discourse specifically considering issues around polarised language and its relation to grievance-based discourse, the creation of shared identity, intertextual use of historical and theoretical texts and evocation of authority. We conclude by suggesting why the dearth of research on terrorist discourse poses problems for the creation of viable counter-terrorism measures.

In this chapter, the focus remains on language but moves away from representations around particular words to instead consider the ways in which specific types of language are used as persuasive devices in themselves. Here, we take another meaning of discourse, one which relates to the concept of register, text-type or genre and involves issues relating to stylistic choice. We thus explore some of the specific linguistic strategies that authors use in the data in order to highlight how these might contribute to the legitimacy or persuasiveness of the extremist discourse. We examine keywords that index formal register, as well as those connected to the concepts of truth and quotation. This is followed by a consideration of how code-switching into Arabic is employed in the texts.

This chapter examines the language around harm, focussing on keywords related to the category of violence: jihad, kill, martrydom and paradise. We identify the frequent use of a religious journey metaphor which extremist writers have taken from the Qur’an and reworked to justify killing. A key stage on this path then, is the conceptualisation of jihad as literal fighting and as obligatory, desired by Allah and in is his name. Three representations around killing help to position Muslims as victims, giving a justification for killing civilians, and helping to assuage fears around losing one’s own life as the result of engaging in violent attacks, again by invoking Allah’s authority and approval. Violence is cast as heroic martyrdom and justified as occurring within the context of a war.

This chapter gives an account of our data and method, specifically outlining how we collected and prepared the texts containing extremist language that are the subject of this book, along with the different tools and techniques that were used for analysis. The chapter then carries out preliminary analyses of the data, using Biber’s multidimensional approach before moving on to describe a methodology called Corpus Assisted Discourse Studies (CADS) which involves a collection of approaches that are united by their use of software to identify linguistic patterns in large, electronically-encoded sets of data. We also describe how we obtained and classified keywords across the three sub-corpora which were used as the basis of focussing our analysis on a manageable set of lexical items.